With digital imaging replacing film-based photography processes, the accurate capture and reproduction of colours has become more challenging. The input sources, such as digital imaging sensors, as well as the output devices, such as monitors and printers, have different colour characteristics.
The colour vision of humans is a complex process. The light is received in the human eye by three different types of cones. Each cone has a different peak wavelength, that is the wavelength with maximal sensitivity, and different distribution of the sensitivity across the light spectrum. The brain then processes the signals from the cones to create a perception of different colours.
A simplified approach to colour vision and representation is the representation of the light spectrum by the three components red (R), green (G) and blue (B). Most imaging sensors produce RGB values for the captured image. However, the sensitivity of the imaging sensors is different to the sensitivity of the human eye. In addition, most output devices such as computer monitors, cannot produce arbitrary light spectra but only mixtures of the spectra of three available colours, which again have different spectra to the sensitivity of the sensor. The influence of the sensor sensitivity, the monitor colour spectrum and the perception of the human eye need to be considered in order to produce a realistic reproduction of a captured image.
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